One Punch Man S2 – 2 [Human Monsters]

Breathe deep… Siiiiiiiiigh… Guess we are doing this. Strap in folks, because this is going to be a rough season of OPM.

Let me start off, with a friendly warning. If your here for my usual attempts at constructive criticism and attempted multifaceted analysis, I apologize. There will be very little of that for these OPM posts. I just… JC Staff have murdered one of my loves, and I cannot forgive that. Not even ONE’s writing will save this season, because they can’t even present that right. These posts are going to be me bitching, moaning, and in general ripping OPM apart for how it fails on every single level. Not even compared to the first season 3 years ago, but as a standalone animated product. I give you this warning now, so that you don’t waste your time if that’s not what you come here for. If so, just skip this show. It’s terrible and not for you. But if you wanna see an angry Lenlo, continue beyond the break.

Let me start off by saying, it’s all shit. Everything is shit, and this post will go section by section to explain how it is shit and how JC Staff have robbed us. Starting off, stills. JC Staff can’t even get stills right. Instead of animating people talking, it’s just backs, environment or shadows. Even when stills of the actual characters are shown, they have this ridiculous fade/filter over them that makes them look terrible. Is this a shitty excuse for shading? How lazy are you JC Staff? On top of that, they can’t even frame their stills right. Cutting them off at eye level, or stupid angles. Like seriously, how do you screw up a 2 person dialogue scene when all you had to do is cut between them? Did you let an intern storyboard this series? If so, fire them without what little pay they get.

And let’s not even talk about the animation, if you can call it that. Most of it was just fading between terrible stills, starting the next fade before the first was over. Making it all look like a blurry mess, annihilating any actual movement in the shot. On top of that, JC Staff cuts away from every interesting segment. From the Serious Series attack to Sonic’s, its as if JC Staff wants to see OPM fail. You can hardly call it animation! And when OPM is actually animated, at its best, it doesn’t even match up to the worst of Season 1’s shots. Look, no one was expecting JC Staff to match the first season. That’s unreasonable, even though it is a series known for crazy animation. But this? This is embarrassing. There are web-shorts on youtube with better animation, and longer runtimes, than this season of OPM.

Animation wasn’t the only problem, the VA’s were all over the place. For instance, Saitama’s heart just wasn’t in it. His voice sounded all wrong when he got “serious” and in general it’s like the VA just didn’t care. Like they could only emulate the one tone. And that’s not even mentioning the line delivery which was just a FUCKING MESS. I swear, the entire episode felt like it was running at 2x speed yet felt an hour long. None of the delivery was well timed, like none of the VA’s were in the same room as each other. All silence between lines cut out, so they come right after another. There’s no pacing to the dialogue, it just vomits out of their mouths with no care for the pacing of the conversation. Id rather they just do speech-bubbles than this shite.

Now, let’s take a moment to get into specifics. I know, shocker, this far in and I am just getting to specifics? Woo boy. But don’t worry, JC Staff fucked this up to. Their only saving grace was that ONE is, in general, a good draftsman. His writing is impeccable, and comedy fantastic. Yet JC Staff ruined this to. They took one of OPM’s best characters, Garou, and destroyed his intro. Where he is supposed to come off as intimidating, he instead is a terribly animated trash can of emotion. They burned through a his intro, such that a 5 minute introduction still felt to fast. Im sure this is a mixture of the previously mentioned “animation”/Direction and VA work, but my god. This is the most important character of the season, and this is what you do? JC Staff, who has a gun to your head?

Seriously, you couldn’t even get Fubuki’s Fuboobies right! Look at this manga panel! Murata puts more care into those things than some mangaka do into their entire series. Yet in an industry with a tendency to increase the size and focus on a characters breasts, you reduced it. You couldn’t even turn your series into some kind of perverse, shitty ecchi with her around. Instead you just took everything good and beautiful in this series and moved it somewhere else. Covering it all with your terrible filter and just… AAAAGH.

I can’t take it, I can’t write anymore. I thought after the first episode, it would be hard, but I could do it. The show would at least be well written. Garou could carry it. But we are 2 episodes in and you have ruined it. You have had 5 chief animation directors, 3 animation directors and 3 assistant animation directors… BY EPISODE 2! This is the kind of falling apart I expect from MAPPA in their finale. Not the 2nd episode of one of the hottest properties in anime right now. I just… sigh. I will stick with this show, like a captain sticks with a sinking ship. I love this series, I own all the manga. I’ve read it for years. To not finish it would be a disservice. But you, dear reader? You can escape. Visit for my weekly meltdown, but don’t watch OPM. Save yourself.